Threats To Boy And Family Get Nuckols 12 More Years

Maynard Nuckols Jr. will spend an additional 12 years behind bars for threatening the family of a boy he was imprisoned for assaulting in a darkened Gault Recreation Center restroom on March 9, 1997.

Five deputies wrestled with Nuckols, handcuffed him and hauled him from court after Wayne County Common Pleas Judge Robert J. Brown passed sentence on the 19-year-old Mansfield Correctional inmate this morning.

Brown earlier had evicted Nuckols' mother, Pamela Nuckols, from his first-floor courtroom when she rose to interrupt pre-sentencing statements from the victim's mother and father.

Five uniformed deputies and a plainclothes officer were in the courtroom for security, three times the number normally present.

Public defender John Leonard had asked Brown to consider four psychiatric reports showing that Nuckols has a low IQ and needs mental health counseling.

Leonard said that Nuckols may not be getting such counseling or the medication necessary to control his mental problems, but Brown said that the criminal justice system "is ill-equipped to deal with (Nuckols) mental health."

"Something happened in your life to turn you in a very dark direction," Brown said before ordering Nuckols to serve four years each on three counts of retaliation, consecutive to his original 23-year sentence for the March 1997 assault against the boy, who was 9 at the time.

"I think the public needs to be protected," Brown said.

"I hope for your sake and everybody else's, it stops," the judge said, referring to Nuckols' written threats from prison, addressed to his victim, the boy's family, judges, prosecutors and others.

Brown asked Nuckols if he had anything to say before sentencing, but after the defendant muttered an inaudible response the judge refused requests from Nuckols' family members to make a brief statement.

Brown did allow the parents of the boy victimized in March 1997 to make statements before sentencing.

"Your mission to try to scare a little boy did not succeed," the victim's mother said to Nuckols.

"We would ask at this point that there be no mercy," she said to Brown, asking him for a sentence that would help her family to resume the healing process that should have begun after Nuckols' original sentencing.

"I trust the court system. (It has) worked for us," the boy's father said, going on to note that, "No one should have to go through what we've gone through the past 2 1/2 years," including the threats from Nuckols that began in January of 1998.

"There's a twisted little man inside that body," the boy's father said, noting Nuckols' lack of remorse and warning that when Nuckols does get out of prison, "perhaps someone else won't survive" as well as his family has managed to cope with Nuckols intrusion into their lives.

"We still fight the demons every day," the boy's father said. He said that his son "will always remain a hero to me because he took the steps to protect himself" by keeping his head and screaming for help when he was assaulted in the recreation center restroom.